Losing that One Person in Our Lives | Review of “So Much Love” by Rebecca Rosenblum (2017) McClelland & Stewart

There is that one person in our daily lives that is important to us. It could be somebody very close to us or just somebody that we see on a day-to-day basis yet never give a second thought too. But remove that one person from our lives and our something in our psyche is vaulted into a state of shock. That is the theme Rebecca Rosenblum brilliantly explores in her novel So Much Love.

Page 3

Just before the winter semester wrapped up at the end of March, one of my Canadian Poetry students disappeared – not just from my class but also maybe from the earth. Catherine Reindeer left the restaurant where she worked at the end of a day shift, but she didn’t come home that night, or any night since. They found her purse in the parking lot the next morning. She was a good student, good enough that she didn’t need me to review her essay topics or suggest background readings. But she was chatty and didn’t seem to have friends in the class, so sometimes I was the recipient of her thoughts on Gwendolyn MacEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Julianna Ohlin. She spent a lot of time reading the biographical notes at the backs of books, always interested in discussing whose marriage had been happy, who worked a day job in addition to writing. She was – is? – a pretty girl, confident, a bit older that the rest. She had a husband, the newspapers said, unusual for an undergrad. I don’t remember a ring. I liked talking to her, but I didn’t know her well. Now that’s she’s gone, I think of her constantly.

Rosenblum has given readers an important element of the human condition to consider over in this book. The main focus of the plot deals with the disappearance of Catherine Reindeer. Readers witness the internal thoughts and struggles of many people that Catherine touched in their lives – from people who were close to her to people who merely worked with her – and we get true look at how interconnected humans are and fragile the human psyche can be.

Pages 118-119

Heading home at the end of the day, I get that familiar homesickness just before I arrive. After a tough day – and now that I’m in my forties, I’m starting to feel like they’re mainly tough days – I still want to just spill it all out to Gretta and see if she can tell it back to me like a bedtime story. This desire has been growing all summer and fall, maybe since the beginning of spring when Catherine Reindeer first vanished, or since we each realized the other was devastated by the loss of this stranger. Or near-stranger. Maybe that was just one agony too many; we are kinder to each other now than we’ve been in years. We still don’t talk much, but her face when she’s genuinely listening to me is a comfort I could fall into. I don’t need advice, or any kind of commentary – after fifteen years, I know what she would say almost as well as what I would. This far into paying off the martial mortgage of intimacy, niceties like “How are you?” have become irrelevant – I know how she’s doing by the way she swallows her first mouthful of coffee in the morning, the rhythm of her stride on the stairs. In the evenings, we sit on opposite side of the living room, the rasp of pages from our respective books the faintest of communications. It is a kind of love, and a kind of loss too. I remember when we would have at least told each other what the books were about.

Rosenblum does a great job with this book of breaking down complex thoughts and emotions of the human psyche and gives those of us who want a careful and conscience read something to ponder over. The different sections of the book have single plot lines, yet the descriptions are vivid and memorable. Definitely a book that should not be rushed through while reading.

Page 181-182

The search went on for three freezing hours before they were given one last round of tea and Timbits and told to go home. No one found anything useful, or not that Kyla heard about. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on with everyone spread out in the trees and dark like that.

In Dermott’s truck on the way home, he hummed a few bars of “Amazing Grace,” but when she didn’t join in, he quit and tapped her knee with his big hand.

“It’ll be okay, Ky. Our heavenly Father is watching.”

She pictured God lying on his couch, watching all their suffering on a flat-screen TV, and didn’t understand why that was suppose to make her feel better.

After the night of the search party, Kyla cam home right after school the rest of the week. It didn’t feel safe to be out alone. Everyone was tense, darting eyes and locked car doors all over Iria. Even if she walked to Starbucks at lunch with Britt, they moved quickly, didn’t linger out front with the other kids, and checked over their shoulders.

So Kyla stayed home, read Ivan Ilych over again, and took notes while Jaycee practised her awful piano downstairs. The picture on the front of the skinny book was of an old man, some artist’s idea of how Ivan looked. Ivan, at the end of his life, seemed sad and exhausted, but that wasn’t the interesting part of the book or the character to Kyla. She thought about poor Ivan as basically a decent person who worked hard but didn’t really know what was important in life or how to find out. The scary part was that he could live his whole life and not even be interested in love or being loved, and die that way.

So Much Love by Rebecca Rosenblum will certainly be one of the most profound and in-depth reads I experienced so far in 2017. She has captured an element of the human condition and documented well here, certainly making me reflect and discuss this book on numerous occasions. Truly a gifted piece of literature.